The art of Edo: frozen in timeby
Robert Fulford

Great art movements may seem inevitable in retrospect, but it usually turns out they depended on
quirks of history. The grotesquely imaginative political system that created national unity in
17th-century Japan had the side effect of stimulating one of the richest of all art periods. This is
the story that animates Edo: Art in Japan, 1615-1868 (Yale University Press, 480
pages,
$150), a dazzling book edited by Robert T. Singer and based on the current exhibition at the
National Gallery in Washington.

Tokugawa Ieyasu, when inventing the first secure national government of Japan, couldn't
have known he was preparing the ground for a flowering of the arts. He wanted only power and
peace, on his terms. After generations of murderous civil wars (the terror-ridden period depicted
in samurai movies), he subdued the daimyo, his fractious fellow warlords. He
made his
own castle town, Edo, the national capital, and from there dictated a peace that lasted 253 years,
under 15 shoguns.

The shoguns allowed regional lords to control their own districts but required them to live
every second year in Edo, and to leave their families behind as hostages when they went home. If
this produced stability through intimidation, it also created an art of intense display. Every year,
about 260 regional lords travelled to or from Edo, each accompanied by as many as 4,000
soldiers and servants. The costumes of the followers, particularly the soldiers, reflected the lord's
status, and some of the most striking pages in Edo: Art in Japan show what
samurai wore
in processions, including one gorgeous helmet in the shape of a gigantic butterfly.

The system of alternate-year attendance also created an art metropolis. It made Edo the
biggest city in the world, with a population of one million by 1720, and focused the energy of
artists and craftsmen. The back-and-forth travels of the lords became a means of national
communication: Each trip spread cultural news, the way art and fashion magazines do in the
20th century. The paintings, garments, prints and art objects of the Edo period reached levels of
excellence seldom approached elsewhere. Exported to Europe in the 19th century, art from Edo
profoundly influenced Degas, Van Gogh, Monet, Whistler and many others.

As you turn these pages, time sometimes feels frozen: Only a learned eye can tell the
difference between a 17th- and an 18th-century scroll. That wasn't an accident. The shoguns,
lacking any belief in progress, wanted stillness and isolation. They banned foreign travel, most
foreign trade, most foreign visitors, all Christian missionaries. Japan reached a level of isolation
that the 20th-century Soviet empire aspired to but never attained.

Through neighbourhood surveillance, the shoguns regulated political, personal and
economic life. As a safety valve they licensed prostitution in certain neighbourhoods, including
Yoshiwara in Edo. In Tales of the Floating World,17th-century novelist Asai Ryoi
described this milieu as a dream of perfumed indolence, a place where people live only for each
moment, "floating, floating . . . like a gourd floating along with the river current," ignoring "the
pauperism staring us in the face" while observing the cycles of the moon and the sight of cherry
blossoms. The atmosphere in these pleasure ghettos attracted artists and writers, who began to
idealize geishas, courtesans and ordinary prostitutes in stories and art. No sex trade in history has
been paid more impressive tributes.

Edo: Art in Japan, 1615-1868 reproduces some 300 objects, from elegant Zen
calligraphy to the florid woodblock prints of the artists who helped inspire Impressionism,
including Hiroshige, Hokusai and Utamaro. The text by Singer and nine other scholars carefully
explains subjects, traditions and influences -- and almost entirely without jargon. The design,
placing the words close to the relevant pictures, is as good as the writing and the reproduction.
Edo: Art in Japan reinforces Yale's reputation as one of the great contemporary
publishers.

People who know a little about modern Japan will find much of the content pleasantly
familiar. The imagery of Edo still dominates Japanese design, and the celebrations shown here
aren't radically different from modern rituals. The book shows a recently discovered
17th-century screen in which citizens carry portable shrines through the streets of Edo on a
festival day, as they still do in Tokyo now.

Japan's seclusion ended in 1853, when Commodore Matthew Perry's four black ships sailed
into the port of Edo, demanded trade rights for the United States and exposed the weakness of
the old system. By 1868, Emperor Meiji was leading Japan into modernity. Soon Edo became
Tokyo, and the art of the shogun era became a memory the world has cherished ever since.